The musical selections for the president's campaign events seem carefully calibrated to appeal to a wide range of voters.

Politico's Mike Allen scored a sweet scoop this morning: the 29-song playlist for President Obama's re-election push. Unlike Allen's usual fare, this isn't about political maneuvering and Washington wheeling-and-dealing. Or is it? Given the famous discipline of the Obama campaign, it's fair to assume this list is carefully calibrated to appeal for optimal demographic appeal -- age, gender, geography, race, and socioeconomics. Here's a quick tour through the playlist and what its selections mean politically.

CLASSIC ROCKNumber: 5
Examples: "We Take Care of Our Own," Bruce Springsteen; "Mr. Blue Sky," Electric Light Orchestra
What It Says: Classic rock is completely inoffensive, so it's bound to play a major role. Furthermore, its biggest fans -- middle-aged, middle-class voters -- are a key election bloc. The Springsteen song is new and could practically have been written for the Obama 2012 campaign, and the Boss is a liberal staple.

INDIE ROCKNumber: 5Examples: "We Used to Wait," Arcade Fire; "You Are the Best Thing," Ray Lamontagne.
What It Says: It's a blatant pander to twenty-somethings. "Hey kids! Remember how much you loved me in 2008? Well, look, I'm still hip and with it." Arcade Fire played benefits for Obama in 2008, and their anthemic bombast is perfect for big rallies.

OLDSTER ROCK
Number: 2
Examples: "Your Smiling Face," James Taylor; "I Got You," Wilco
What It Says:Dad-rockers are basically Obama's key demographic: Well-to-do, suburban, educated, and (probably) moderate Democrats politically. The only surprise about Wilco's inclusion was that there's only one of their tunes on the list. The band is from Obama's home base of Chicago, it has played benefits for him, and he's noted his love for its members. If Obama loses, he'll be singing not "I Got You" but rather "Misunderstood" (I'd like to thank you all/For nothing/Nothing at all."). One might expect a president working hard to win the Tar Heel State might have chosen Taylor's "Carolina in My Mind."

SOUL AND R&B
Number: 9
Examples: "Let's Stay Together," Al Green; "Love You I Do," Jennifer Hudson; "Green Onions," Booker T. & the MGs
What It Says: This is the largest single genre group, but it runs the gamut from classic soul (Aretha is for the same aging boomer population as James Taylor) to more contemporary fare like Raphael Saadiq. A large number of R&B tunes helps the president connect with black audiences without turning off older white folks: Who doesn't love "Green Onions"? And after his own impromptu rendition, the Al Green standard was a mandatory selection.

POPNumber: 2
Examples: "Different People," No Doubt; "The Best Thing About Me Is You," Rick Martin feat. Joss Stone
What It Says: We're frankly puzzled. Obama has very few straight pop tunes, and the ones he does are a little offbeat -- No Doubt? Is he running for president of 1998? It's also a little surprising that he left off his pal Justin Bieber.

COUNTRYNumber: 7
Examples: "My Town," Montgomery Gentry; "Stand Up," Sugarland
What It Says: The president knows he needs to firm up his support among white working-class voters, so country is the second-largest group of songs after soul and R&B. The choices tend to be patriotic, small-town-America-celebrating songs, logically enough. But they show a rather limited taste for and knowledge of all things twang: there are two songs apiece from country-pop crossover stars Sugarland and from Darius Rucker, the former Hootie & the Blowfish frontman who's remade himself as a Nashville star.

RAP
Number: 0
Examples: N/A
What It Says: In a shocking omission, Obama hasn't included a single rap song on his list. That's despite vocal support and occasional musical shoutouts from Jay-Z, Nas, and others; despite his own professed love for Lil Wayne; despite his invitation of Common to the White House; and despite K'Naan publicly offering the president use of his "Wavin' Flag" even as he asked Mitt Romney to stop using it. But rap is dangerous territory for a politician, liable to scare off older white voters and with lyrics often marred by casual sexism and talk of violence. After Common's appearance caused a kerfuffle, the Obama team is trying to tread carefully.

MISCELLANY
Gender Breakdown: Only six of these songs center around a female singer, while 19 have male lead singers. Four are mixed, and one is an instrumental. The president is apparently not too concerned about losing the female vote, which he won 56-43 in 2008.
Nationality Breakdown: Surprisingly, nearly a sixth of the choices on the list are by foreign bands (including Arcade Fire, a Montreal-based group of American ex-pats). That includes a sizable English contingent: twee indie rockers Noah and the Whale, Florence and the Machine, and ELO. There's an appearance by Irish rockers U2, but they've become such a staple of campaign music that we're just thankful he didn't choose "Beautiful Day" (the song is perhaps tainted by being the theme of John Kerry's unsuccessful 2004 run). Skipping "With or Without You" was probably a smart electoral choice, too.

Most Popular

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.